First read it, I was ten.

‘Twas strange and new and exciting then.

Later, I found that ‘two roads diverged in a yellow wood’, in my life too – only my own wood was green. I took one road, coz at the time I hated the other, carried on walking on it for years…  and then again I found there was a fork. I took one path, not knowing, not caring, in haste and confusion and for years and years and years afterwards, felt regret and frustration and sorrow, feeling that surely the other would have been better.

And then again, a choice on my path. Reading the poem again, I took the path I felt had ‘perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear’ and afterwards decided that it was ‘the one less traveled by’, sure that had ‘made all the difference’. You see, I knew so much more about myself and my choices then – or so I thought.

And all these years, all these years, I thought I understood the poem… But yesterday I read it again, with a new light – just acquired… and found that its meaning had been obscured – simplified, brought to complete distortion of sense to satisfy commodity of understanding.

Like millions of others, I had fallen into the trap of deceptive haste, keeping only the end of the poem – that is quoted everywhere. Like millions of others, I had retained these last two lines. Why, I wonder, did I choose to ignore all the other lines? As a matter of fact, why did I choose to ignore the whole poem, for it actually keeps showing that the two roads were the same: ‘then took the other, as just as fair’ and ‘both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black’. That poem is so much more complex and intriguing than its fame has decided…

So, if this poem is not just a simplistic statement about individualism, what does it really mean? Well, it seems to imply just the opposite: that the path I took does not matter, that my choice has not made all the difference…

So this leaves me with – what? No right or wrong choices anymore? What does make the difference, then?

‘Tis the end of false certitude, and a glimpse in a void full of airy, endless questions…

Indeed, as Robert Frost himself said: ‘A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom’.